Security quote of the week

[Posted September 9, 2020 by jake]

This week, to mark the fifteenth anniversary, I have checked the status of the URLs in my thesis bibliography. Sadly, I find that 82 of them (57%) no longer work.

It’s not just random blog posts, or geocities (remember that?) sites that don’t work. Major companies, industrial research labs and even a number of computer science departments have reorganised their web presence and decided that maintaining old URLs as a courtesy to others is not worth their effort.

I fully expect that search engines would locate the new location in some cases, but many of the documents are gone — as indeed is the whole of the site that used to host them. In passing I will note that for $5000 you can buy the domain that used to hold policy documents issued by the Indian Government!

— Richard Clayton

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 10, 2020 8:44 UTC (Thu) by geert (subscriber, #98403) [Link] (4 responses)

I gave it a try for mine, defended in 1999:
- 3 working links,
- 1 link is automatically redirected to a generic page on the site,
- 22 broken links (404 or domain not found).

Google is (must be) your friend...

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 12, 2020 17:01 UTC (Sat) by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359) [Link] (3 responses)

I never did one (had practical training instead and just taught stuff myself), but I also noticed this in external links I had etc.

It’s really a PITA and I don’t understand it. When I switched the MirBSD website from dynamically-generated to statically-generated HTML, I went through hell and back with mod_rewrite to keep *all* existing links working. It’s not *that* hard even.

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 18, 2020 10:46 UTC (Fri) by jezuch (subscriber, #52988) [Link] (2 responses)

HTML places no value whatsoever on link stability. Making hyperlinks unidirectional is the "billion dollar mistake" equivalent for the web. It's completely contrary to the idea of hypertext that the H in HTML was supposed to refer to.

/rant

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 18, 2020 19:08 UTC (Fri) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

> Making hyperlinks unidirectional

is how you allow people to create hyperlinks to systems they don't have write access to.

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 21, 2020 16:55 UTC (Mon) by zlynx (guest, #2285) [Link]

Yeah I've heard all the "ideal world" arguments before.

Notice that those perfect hyperlink systems never actually went anywhere and HTML did. Because you just can't get people to agree to two-way links, and correct relationship tag triples and whatever else your academic paper was written for.

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 10, 2020 16:28 UTC (Thu) by Trou.fr (subscriber, #26289) [Link] (4 responses)

A good policy for work that references outside resources and that is expected to live longer than a year would be to ensure those external urls are saved in the wayback machine : https://web.archive.org/

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 12, 2020 17:02 UTC (Sat) by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359) [Link] (2 responses)

But that service doesn’t exist for all that long yet, and who knows how long it’ll be around…

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 14, 2020 19:54 UTC (Mon) by pj (subscriber, #4506) [Link] (1 responses)

archive.org has been around since 1996 (according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Archive), and should be around for much longer. Admittedly the 'Save Page Now' feature has only been around since 2013, but I agree that that feature should be used for all published papers and their links.

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 15, 2020 2:10 UTC (Tue) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

The web based 'Save Page Now' feature would be pretty tedious to use on a paper unless you run it through some scripting. Luckily there is also the email based equivalent feature at savepagenow@archive.org that you can just copy-paste the whole paper into.

Either way, probably all the journals and preprint sites and similar should be automatically archiving all links from submitted papers.

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 12, 2020 17:05 UTC (Sat) by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604) [Link]

I believe that’s what is usually done on Wikipedia.

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 19, 2020 9:12 UTC (Sat) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link]

To be fair, "double you double you double you dot dot india dot com" is not a good domain name.

But they should absolutely maintain redirects on that domain rather than letting it expire, good grief!